To: The Office of Facilities

From: Allison Calle, CCNY Student

Subject: Tracking Shuttle Buses 

Date: September 25, 2025 

Purpose:

The main objective of this memo is to see if we can come to a potential compromise that helps CCNY students track shuttle buses by contributing some insight to the problem and suggesting a solution.

Background Information:

CCNY is a great college coming up with a way to efficiently help students come to school in an easy and free way. On average, a shuttle bus comes every 15 mins from the stop at either 145 st or 125 st to the stop at school. Students are unsure whether the bus passed to see whether it is faster to walk or wait for the bus. This confuses students whether walking or waiting will be fast to arrive at school making them waste energy and time on a situation that is not needed.

Problem:

Since I’ve been a student in this school I have had issues with the location of shuttle buses. I went around CCNY to find out this is a shared concern. They all agreed having a way to track these buses will significantly help their commute to school.

 Most students are coming from home or work on the B or D train. They take long commutes like myself that take about 1 hour to an 1 hour and 30 mins. The train stops at 125th St, 135th St and 145 St. At 125 st the shuttle bus takes a long time since it’s a bit longer to get from and to school. On several occasions it feels faster to travel two more stops to 145th St and walk.

You might ask why not stop at 135th St right in the middle of both shuttle buses stops. This train stop leaves you at the bottom of St. Nicholas Park where you need to climb a lot of stairs. Which is tiring after a long day of work. 

This impacts students’ lives by adding extra stress on them. This can lead to students wasting time and energy where they can be putting on academic workload.

Recommendation:

I believe we can change this by implementing a GPS tracking system similar to the MTA trackers on buses. They use real-time tracking for people to decide whether they wait for the MTA bus or walk. A decision we can allow CCNY students to choose whether they want to stay at 125th St or 145th St. 

While trying to develop an app for the tracking of shuttle buses I came across a website from CCNY called “Tagit”. This website was designed to track shuttle buses but when using my ccny login credentials it seemed not to work. Which leads to my idea of developing an app. This app will be a way CCNY students will track the bus. The way it will work is students will use their login credential just like they did before to ensure only CCNY students will use the app. We can even improve it by using Face Id so it would be easier for us to login. I would call the Track My Shuttle, TMS for short.

The cost of this idea will not be much, we would need to hire someone to develop an app. We will also need time when trying to track the buses. This will take a while but it’s a small price to pay for current and future students’ efficiency.

Advertising:

Once the process is done. The way I would advertise would be putting a QR code poster in the bus stops of the school, promoting the new app and system. I will also create a digital poster on the Cunyfirst slide show for those who aren’t aware of the new changes since everyone logs in into CUNY.

Conclusion:

This issue may not seem urgent but it’s still an idea to look into. This idea isn’t cost efficient or hard to develop and it will create a positive impact on students’ lives. Hopefully, this has sparked your interest and concern of students’ needs, for questions or concerns please feel free to contact me. Thank you for your time and patience.